[reportlab-users] nbsp and justification problem

[Robin Becker]

On 29/04/2010 09:52, Anton Petrushenkov wrote:

> Robin, thanks for such a fast answer.

> Actually, I realize what&nbsp is ;)

> I've dug some sources, and now suppose, that problem is (in my opinion) in

> algorithm that counts "extraspace" parameter (in xpreformatted.py).

> I mean it doesn't know width of this very symbol and that is why returns

> faulty number.


I think the issue here is that we may or may not be doing the right thing a) wrt 
counting spaces and b) ensuring that PDF does the right thing.

In the text

aaaaa bbbbb ccccc ddddd

we normally count three spaces; if we're justifying then what happens is that we 
take the total observed length of the line w0 and work out how much extra space 
has to be added to make the line reach its target wt; that is wt - w0, to make 
use of PDF we issue an extra command which adjusts all the spaces in the line by 
the required amount ie we set wxs = (wt-w0)/ns where ns is the number of spaces 
ie 3 in the above case.

Unfortunately I believe that we may make mistakes in the rendering of the above 
simple idea when hard spaces are used. I don't think PDF has a separate hard 
space character so our count would be low adding extra space to an extra space 
would make the line jut out on the right (for normal left-right text). If that 
is the problem we'll need to think how to organize the count better; the code is 
already fairly painful and it uses string splitting for speed and to make the 
space counting easier :(


> I'm continuing to dig deeper now, but if I'm completely wrong on this one

> please tell me.

>

> Is there any way to perform a search on this mail-list's archives? Googling

> on "reportlab intra-word breaking" doesn't help :(


Unfortunately the users list is simple mailman and I don't think that supports 
searches directly

However, I googled for reportlab bargen +paragraph and this appeared

http://two.pairlist.net/pipermail/reportlab-users/2006-April/004841.html

I know that Henning v Bargen is interested in this area. If you go to

http://deco-cow.sourceforge.net./

you'll see quite an active project.
-- 
Robin Becker